Zach Cregger’s ‘Resident Evil’ Deconstructs the Series’ Final Boss—and Rebuilds It
Zach Cregger’s take on RE beautifully recreates the survival horror experience and pushes the franchise’s boss battles into new territory.
“Yes! Video games!”
SPOILERS AHEAD! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.
Resident Evil, the foundational survival horror gaming franchise, has had an especially interesting life as a film series. A lot of ground has been covered across seven movies and a single-season TV show, yet it still felt like a good Resident Evil film had yet to be cracked. Zach Cregger, an avid franchise fan and gamer, has not only created a near-flawless Resident Evil movie, but one of the greatest video game adaptations of all-time. Cregger’s film follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier determined to complete his delivery in the midst of an ongoing zombie outbreak in Raccoon City.
Despite the movie not featuring any existing series characters, it repeatedly immerses the audience in the experience of what it feels like to play the game. One of the most interesting ways in which this is explored is through the film’s final set piece – an epic bioweapon showdown – and how it reinvents Resident Evil’s traditional approach to its final boss battles. The transforming abomination that must be destroyed is the person you’ve been rooting for the entire movie. It brilliantly reinterprets the arch idea of a big final battle by presenting it through the monster’s perspective.
A good video game movie involves more than simply faithfully adapting a video game. In fact, most video game adaptations play around with their source material and reinvent their worlds because they’re not video games anymore. Various approaches have been taken with adapting the IP, but Cregger is the first to properly simulate the experience of playing a game.
